BUILDING BOATS ON A BEACH
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Aboard Vilisar we’re faced with two serious problems at present. First, we need to replace the wormshoe underneath Vilisar’s keel. Like the zinc anodes that protect the bronze shaft and propeller from electrolysis, I guess we have always known that a wormshoe is ‘sacrificial’, that the traditional wood, felt-and tar system designed to protect the boat’s keel from shipworm damage (see the blog in November 2007 for information about shipworm) would need replacing at some point. But, as long as the wormshoe looked all right when we painted the bottom each year, we didn’t really have to think about it much. Up on the grid last week, however, there was no doubt that something had to be done.
At first I was dismayed. My God! Shipworm! The plank that holds the tar-soaked felt in place is totally riddled with shipworm holes. That plank never gets bottom paint on it, of course, because, on a grid and especially on a makeshift grid, you cannot access the wormshoe when the boat is standing on its keel. The divers who clean the bottom have been telling me that, while the rest of the bottom is generally fine, there are invariably huge clusters of molluscs that have to be laboriously chipped away from the shoe. Once the wormshoe disintegrates, the keel is totally open to invasion by shipworm. It’s a serious problem everywhere, even in northern waters, but in the tropics, those little critters can grow much, much faster, reaching sometimes several metres in length and following the grain of a piece of wood. I have been kept awake at night at the vision of having the bottom fall out of the boat one night!
What I don’t know at present is whether shipworms (teredo navalis) have in fact encroached into the keel. Vilisar was creosoted several times both inside and out when it was built thirty-five years ago, we were told by George Friend, the vessel’s builder up in Sidney, British Columbia. From records I found on the boat when we moved aboard, the hull was ‘wooded’ (i.e., all the bottom paint removed) somewhere back around 1991 and the hull and keel soaked with several coats of creosote before building up bottom paint again. So, one hopes that some of this anti-teredo-worm chemical has still not leached completely away. Creosote is now prohibited in Canada and the U.S.A. But it is a famously effective barrier. Will have to investigate other treatments.
Visiting the beach shipwrights in Manta
Whenever your drive over to Manta, the busy fishing port with its many trawlers of all sizes(reputedly, the largest tuna-landing port in the world) about two hours away to the south, the entrance highway from the north takes you right along the long, curving sandy beach. I have always told myself that I wanted to walk along the part of the playa where they are building quite large wooden fishing trawlers and find out how they do it, i.e., how do they get them into and out of the water, what kind of wood do they use, what are their tools, do they have plans or are the boats build from half-models or even just from memory? But somehow, I have never so far had time to stop.
The replacement of our sacrificial wormshoe now gives me the opportunity. Of course we could take Vilisar to Puerto Lucia in Salinas (near Guayaquil) where they have a proper travel lift. But, intrepid and self-sufficient cruisers that we are, perhaps we might find a local solution. In a real pinch, I think I could get a new wormshoe onto the keel myself with the help of local craftsmen. But, if there is all that shipwright experience over in Manta, maybe we can tap into that. There’s no point in going up the learning curve by yourself – and, statistically, certainly not with only one chance to get something right.
So it was that I travelled to Manta yesterday with Wacho, our friend, mechanic and general guardian angel. Julio from the Chilean sailboat, “Pancho” was also along for the trip; he and Wacho needed to find motor mounts for his sick Volvo Penta inboard diesel engine and get the engiine head planed, and Wacho was buying plywood and outboard-motor stabiliser-fins for another cruiser. My aim was to discuss our wormshoe problem with the carpenteros de ribera on the beach with Wacho's assistance.
After the two hour drive to town, we spend most of the morning in futile attempts to find motor mounts and stabilising fins. But we do drop off Pancho’s engine head to be reground and pick up new gaskets from Empaques de Columbiano near the bus station. Finally, around noon we are driving along the sandy beach and parking Babushka, as I call Wacho's Russian-built truck, in front of the giant wooden trawlers-in-progress near the water. Wacho asks around for the maestro. He is referred to a man in his late thirties who is at present sawing a yellowish-coloured plank laid out on the sand using a Stihl chainsaw; another worker stands on the other end of the plank to keep it from moving about. Wacho indicates he needs to talk to the maestro when he has a moment free and we withdraw to the shade to wait. (The head craftsman is always addressed formally as maestro until - and even after - he has been introduced. It is a sign of respect, and handy also if you can’t remember names.)
Eventually he comes over and we stand in the shade of the stake truck to talk. I have printed out photographs of Vilisar up on the grid so he can get an idea of the hull shape. Clearly, Vilisar is but a toy compared to the 80-100-foot giants we are surrounded by. Wormshoe? No problem! We do this all the time for the trawlers! He gestures towards the hull they are working on.
Although, until you walk around to the other side, it appears to be a new vessel, it is in fact a complete rebuild of an older trawler. All the rather beat-up looking frames have been “sistered” with cut timbers made new from red guaiacum (spelling?), a tropical wood roughly equivalent in weight and density to ironwood, and bolted with stainless steel to the old ones. The sharply-angular frames for the hull where it narrows near the propeller and the stern are actually made from pieces of the tree that have a natural angle to them, much as I think hickory hardwood branches were once used in North America for the same purposes. The planking, Maestro Alberto, the carpentero de ribera, tells us, is made from yellow camphorwood from the Amazon. Each plank is roughly shaped, not by measuring, but by eye-balling, and then cross-cutting or ripping it freehand using the chainsaw. Finally, the plank is fastened to the ribs with large, square, galvanised ships nails . I never saw anyone using plans or drawings or half-models, but the shipwrights were in this case basically using the old boat as a form. There were other new, large trawlers in framed-up condition, but nobody was working on them at that moment; maybe they do use drawings in that case.
While they were still installing camphorwood planking, up high near the decks of the boat, two caulkers were busy paying out cotton or oakum material and hammering it into the seam with mallets and irons, filling the sometimes quite large cracks between the planking and the air with the echoing sound of hammers. Indeed everything about the work going on was about as traditional in methods and hand-work as any shipyard one hundred years ago. The only modern tools I saw were the chainsaw and an electric handhled grinder. There were no travel lifts about, no cranes, no vehicles except pick-up trucks, no table saws or circular saws. Nothing of the kind. A third man was adding a grey paste into the caulked seams. I asked if tar would be used in the seams, but Maestro Alberto said, no.
While we talked, we were watching an engineless fishing smack beating its way to windward across the large bay against the whitecaps toward the fishing harbour. By the time we had finished, it had made good the mile or so and had the anchor down. “We don’t build sailboats (valeros) any more, he said. “Antiguado!” he said, smiling. The big trawler he was working on would be powered by a large eight-cylinder Caterpillar diesel.
Maestro Lister
Alberto told us that he was too busy at the moment to work on Vilisar. But he said he had a colleague who was extremely good and he might be available. Twenty minutes after a cellphone call, Maestro Lister Rodriquez appears on the scene. Am I grasping at straws when I take it as a good omen that his first name is the same as Vilisar’s diesel engine? Maestro Lister is middle-aged, short, dark and rather overweight. But his eyes are bright and, although his accent makes it very difficult for me to understand his Spanish, he and Wacho converse at a rapid rate, Wacho going over what he has already told Maestro Alberto. By this time we have a small crowd of interested workers standing around us in a shady semi-circle.
We flash the photos of Vilisar taken recently on the makeshift grid so he can get an idea of what it’s about. As it turns out he knows Bahía de Caráquez well and suggests that he can probably do the work on the beach there. The work is quite usual for him, albeit on a much larger scale. In further questioning, he says he will cut a new “zapato” (shoe) out of iron wood (guaiacum) and fit it to the keel after removing the old one. He didn’t seem to know about using tar or asphalt-impregnated Irish Felt between the wormshoe and the keel. But he went and got us an open gallon can of a sticky, viscous, tar-like substance called “Alquatran”, which he said he would liberally smear on the keel and the shoe. The wood is impervious to guisandos (shipworms) as long we don’t hit anything too hard and break it off. He would fasten the zapato with stainless fasteners, but if we want bronze, he could do that too. If we want fieltro in between, that's fine with him too.
The left open the question of whether we should take Vilisar around to Manta, place her on the massive sledge that they use to pull up and launch the big trawlers. I can imagine how they get them up the beach: they bring the boats into about eight feet of water and over the sledge and then use a big Caterpillar front-end loader as a tug. After blocking up the boats, they pull the sledge away. There is only one sledge for everybody and it was just standing around on the beach. Have not quite yet figured out how they get a boat back in, though. Big timbers, that's for sure! But, Maestro Lister said, they charge $800 to handle a big trawler; he had no experience with toy boats like ours but imagined we could save the cost altogether by doing hteh work over in Bahia.
He was unable to give us a rough estimate on time and cost, but he suggested we put the vessel up against the wall in Bahía de Caráquez at the next high tide (around 14 December). He would travel over, take a good look and get down to numbers. We exchanged cellphone numbers (if anyone is interested you can reach him at Ecuador +9+405-7770) and promised to check tides and get back to him. Wacho said he would drive over to Manta personally and pick Amestro Lister up on the date we agree upon.
As we drove away in Babushka, we were all a-jabber about the possibilities and happy that we have a way forward.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Aboard Vilisar we’re faced with two serious problems at present. First, we need to replace the wormshoe underneath Vilisar’s keel. Like the zinc anodes that protect the bronze shaft and propeller from electrolysis, I guess we have always known that a wormshoe is ‘sacrificial’, that the traditional wood, felt-and tar system designed to protect the boat’s keel from shipworm damage (see the blog in November 2007 for information about shipworm) would need replacing at some point. But, as long as the wormshoe looked all right when we painted the bottom each year, we didn’t really have to think about it much. Up on the grid last week, however, there was no doubt that something had to be done.
At first I was dismayed. My God! Shipworm! The plank that holds the tar-soaked felt in place is totally riddled with shipworm holes. That plank never gets bottom paint on it, of course, because, on a grid and especially on a makeshift grid, you cannot access the wormshoe when the boat is standing on its keel. The divers who clean the bottom have been telling me that, while the rest of the bottom is generally fine, there are invariably huge clusters of molluscs that have to be laboriously chipped away from the shoe. Once the wormshoe disintegrates, the keel is totally open to invasion by shipworm. It’s a serious problem everywhere, even in northern waters, but in the tropics, those little critters can grow much, much faster, reaching sometimes several metres in length and following the grain of a piece of wood. I have been kept awake at night at the vision of having the bottom fall out of the boat one night!
What I don’t know at present is whether shipworms (teredo navalis) have in fact encroached into the keel. Vilisar was creosoted several times both inside and out when it was built thirty-five years ago, we were told by George Friend, the vessel’s builder up in Sidney, British Columbia. From records I found on the boat when we moved aboard, the hull was ‘wooded’ (i.e., all the bottom paint removed) somewhere back around 1991 and the hull and keel soaked with several coats of creosote before building up bottom paint again. So, one hopes that some of this anti-teredo-worm chemical has still not leached completely away. Creosote is now prohibited in Canada and the U.S.A. But it is a famously effective barrier. Will have to investigate other treatments.
Visiting the beach shipwrights in Manta
Whenever your drive over to Manta, the busy fishing port with its many trawlers of all sizes(reputedly, the largest tuna-landing port in the world) about two hours away to the south, the entrance highway from the north takes you right along the long, curving sandy beach. I have always told myself that I wanted to walk along the part of the playa where they are building quite large wooden fishing trawlers and find out how they do it, i.e., how do they get them into and out of the water, what kind of wood do they use, what are their tools, do they have plans or are the boats build from half-models or even just from memory? But somehow, I have never so far had time to stop.
The replacement of our sacrificial wormshoe now gives me the opportunity. Of course we could take Vilisar to Puerto Lucia in Salinas (near Guayaquil) where they have a proper travel lift. But, intrepid and self-sufficient cruisers that we are, perhaps we might find a local solution. In a real pinch, I think I could get a new wormshoe onto the keel myself with the help of local craftsmen. But, if there is all that shipwright experience over in Manta, maybe we can tap into that. There’s no point in going up the learning curve by yourself – and, statistically, certainly not with only one chance to get something right.
So it was that I travelled to Manta yesterday with Wacho, our friend, mechanic and general guardian angel. Julio from the Chilean sailboat, “Pancho” was also along for the trip; he and Wacho needed to find motor mounts for his sick Volvo Penta inboard diesel engine and get the engiine head planed, and Wacho was buying plywood and outboard-motor stabiliser-fins for another cruiser. My aim was to discuss our wormshoe problem with the carpenteros de ribera on the beach with Wacho's assistance.
After the two hour drive to town, we spend most of the morning in futile attempts to find motor mounts and stabilising fins. But we do drop off Pancho’s engine head to be reground and pick up new gaskets from Empaques de Columbiano near the bus station. Finally, around noon we are driving along the sandy beach and parking Babushka, as I call Wacho's Russian-built truck, in front of the giant wooden trawlers-in-progress near the water. Wacho asks around for the maestro. He is referred to a man in his late thirties who is at present sawing a yellowish-coloured plank laid out on the sand using a Stihl chainsaw; another worker stands on the other end of the plank to keep it from moving about. Wacho indicates he needs to talk to the maestro when he has a moment free and we withdraw to the shade to wait. (The head craftsman is always addressed formally as maestro until - and even after - he has been introduced. It is a sign of respect, and handy also if you can’t remember names.)
Eventually he comes over and we stand in the shade of the stake truck to talk. I have printed out photographs of Vilisar up on the grid so he can get an idea of the hull shape. Clearly, Vilisar is but a toy compared to the 80-100-foot giants we are surrounded by. Wormshoe? No problem! We do this all the time for the trawlers! He gestures towards the hull they are working on.
Although, until you walk around to the other side, it appears to be a new vessel, it is in fact a complete rebuild of an older trawler. All the rather beat-up looking frames have been “sistered” with cut timbers made new from red guaiacum (spelling?), a tropical wood roughly equivalent in weight and density to ironwood, and bolted with stainless steel to the old ones. The sharply-angular frames for the hull where it narrows near the propeller and the stern are actually made from pieces of the tree that have a natural angle to them, much as I think hickory hardwood branches were once used in North America for the same purposes. The planking, Maestro Alberto, the carpentero de ribera, tells us, is made from yellow camphorwood from the Amazon. Each plank is roughly shaped, not by measuring, but by eye-balling, and then cross-cutting or ripping it freehand using the chainsaw. Finally, the plank is fastened to the ribs with large, square, galvanised ships nails . I never saw anyone using plans or drawings or half-models, but the shipwrights were in this case basically using the old boat as a form. There were other new, large trawlers in framed-up condition, but nobody was working on them at that moment; maybe they do use drawings in that case.
While they were still installing camphorwood planking, up high near the decks of the boat, two caulkers were busy paying out cotton or oakum material and hammering it into the seam with mallets and irons, filling the sometimes quite large cracks between the planking and the air with the echoing sound of hammers. Indeed everything about the work going on was about as traditional in methods and hand-work as any shipyard one hundred years ago. The only modern tools I saw were the chainsaw and an electric handhled grinder. There were no travel lifts about, no cranes, no vehicles except pick-up trucks, no table saws or circular saws. Nothing of the kind. A third man was adding a grey paste into the caulked seams. I asked if tar would be used in the seams, but Maestro Alberto said, no.
While we talked, we were watching an engineless fishing smack beating its way to windward across the large bay against the whitecaps toward the fishing harbour. By the time we had finished, it had made good the mile or so and had the anchor down. “We don’t build sailboats (valeros) any more, he said. “Antiguado!” he said, smiling. The big trawler he was working on would be powered by a large eight-cylinder Caterpillar diesel.
Maestro Lister
Alberto told us that he was too busy at the moment to work on Vilisar. But he said he had a colleague who was extremely good and he might be available. Twenty minutes after a cellphone call, Maestro Lister Rodriquez appears on the scene. Am I grasping at straws when I take it as a good omen that his first name is the same as Vilisar’s diesel engine? Maestro Lister is middle-aged, short, dark and rather overweight. But his eyes are bright and, although his accent makes it very difficult for me to understand his Spanish, he and Wacho converse at a rapid rate, Wacho going over what he has already told Maestro Alberto. By this time we have a small crowd of interested workers standing around us in a shady semi-circle.
We flash the photos of Vilisar taken recently on the makeshift grid so he can get an idea of what it’s about. As it turns out he knows Bahía de Caráquez well and suggests that he can probably do the work on the beach there. The work is quite usual for him, albeit on a much larger scale. In further questioning, he says he will cut a new “zapato” (shoe) out of iron wood (guaiacum) and fit it to the keel after removing the old one. He didn’t seem to know about using tar or asphalt-impregnated Irish Felt between the wormshoe and the keel. But he went and got us an open gallon can of a sticky, viscous, tar-like substance called “Alquatran”, which he said he would liberally smear on the keel and the shoe. The wood is impervious to guisandos (shipworms) as long we don’t hit anything too hard and break it off. He would fasten the zapato with stainless fasteners, but if we want bronze, he could do that too. If we want fieltro in between, that's fine with him too.
The left open the question of whether we should take Vilisar around to Manta, place her on the massive sledge that they use to pull up and launch the big trawlers. I can imagine how they get them up the beach: they bring the boats into about eight feet of water and over the sledge and then use a big Caterpillar front-end loader as a tug. After blocking up the boats, they pull the sledge away. There is only one sledge for everybody and it was just standing around on the beach. Have not quite yet figured out how they get a boat back in, though. Big timbers, that's for sure! But, Maestro Lister said, they charge $800 to handle a big trawler; he had no experience with toy boats like ours but imagined we could save the cost altogether by doing hteh work over in Bahia.
He was unable to give us a rough estimate on time and cost, but he suggested we put the vessel up against the wall in Bahía de Caráquez at the next high tide (around 14 December). He would travel over, take a good look and get down to numbers. We exchanged cellphone numbers (if anyone is interested you can reach him at Ecuador +9+405-7770) and promised to check tides and get back to him. Wacho said he would drive over to Manta personally and pick Amestro Lister up on the date we agree upon.
As we drove away in Babushka, we were all a-jabber about the possibilities and happy that we have a way forward.
posted by rjb @ Tuesday, November 25, 2008
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